The first Switchboard used in Salisbury at the turn of the 20th century is on display at the Salisbury Historical Society Museum. Also on display is the crank telephone. This is what would have been in the houses at the time. When you needed to make a call, you would pick up the receiver and turn the crank. That would send an electrical current over the wire to the switchboard, causing the little door on the switchboard attached to your line to drop open.
Sometime in 1898, a group of men in town got together and formed a board of directors to start the Kearsarge Tel. Co.
By 1900 the office was located over what is now the Crossroads Store.
In 1908 the deed to ownership of House #1 (at the crossroads of Rte 4 & Rte 127 N/E) shows the name of the Kearsarge Telephone company included in some capacity. Perhaps the back portion.
We do know from an account of Liza Buzzell’s that the front room served as a switchboard office. Lisa Buzzell, daughter of John Dearborn, became the first woman operator at the age of 16. She was paid $1.00 per week. See the link below for her account in her own words.
There were very few telephone lines to accommodate the number of customers so there was something called party lines where sometimes as many as 12 or more subscribers would be on the same line. Each customer on a line was assigned a ring to indicate when a call was for them. For example, 1 long and 1 short, 2 long, 1 short etc. When you heard your assigned ring you would pickup the phone and take the call. The problem with that was, so could everyone else on the line. Eavesdropping was a common problem. (Please be sure no one touches the switchboard). This system existed for residents on the Gerrish Road, and perhaps elsewhere in town, early into the 1970’s!
Eliza Buzzell an early operator and Fred Adams an early employee for the Kearsarge Telephone company share their remembrances:
https://www.salisburyhistoricalsociety.org/remembering-early-telecommunications/
Below is a recent correspondence from Tom Little regarding some details about he early days of telecommunications. We are grateful for this input:
“Prompted by a recent Facebook posting, I had the opportunity to peruse some of the webpages of the Salisbury Historical Society. I was VERY impressed. I was particularly interested in the page on South Road Village, since the houses of my great-grandfather (TR Little) and great-great-grandfather (TD Little) are in that.
From there, I was drawn to the South Road Graveyard webpage. This cemetery is of particular significance to me because the first 3 generations of Littles to live in Salisbury are all buried there, and I’m grateful for the efforts of the Salisbury Cemetery Commission over the past few years to restore the cemetery.
This led me to the page on Telecommunications, which was of interest because TD and TR were among the incorporators of the Kearsarge Telephone Company. (I believe the Historical Society has some of the early KTC paperwork, including a list of incorporators.) In fact, the creation of the Kearsarge Telephone Company in 1888 started a 100 year connection between KTC and the Little family, spanning 5 generations. On the webpage, there is a reference to the house at the corner of rte 4 & rte 127 which, if memory serves, was the home of Bert and Carrie (Little) Adams. This makes sense because Bert, TR’s son-in-law, was manager of the telephone company at one point and that home was, for many years, the operating base for the Salisbury end of the KTC territory. Sometime after 1901, when KTC merged with the Potter Place and New London Telephone Company, TR’s younger son, A. Stanley Little, moved to New London and took responsibility for that end of the territory, eventually becoming manager of the whole company. Following in their father’s footsteps, Fred Adams (Bert’s son) and Art Little (Stan’s son) each spent the bulk of their working years as employees (and board members) of the Kearsarge Telephone Company. Finishing out the series, Fred’s son (Tom Adams) and Art’s son (me) each spent time as KTC employees, although for much shorter durations than our fathers.”.